This week we feature, Gaetano DiNardi, SEO Manager at Pipedrive. Pipedrive is a CRM & pipeline management tool that helps you focus on actions that matter.

In this interview, you can read more about his work at Pipedrive, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.

Your location: New York, USA.

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Your favorite gadget: iPhone.

You start your day with: Italian Espresso and Google Analytics.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Prioritize tasks in Asana at the beginning of every week.

Your top blogs you read daily: Moz, Search Engine Watch, Inbound.org , Google Webmaster Blog.

“Focus on quality not just quantity.”

Describe an average day at Pipedrive?

We’re a fast growing tech company (Sales CRM software) so there’s always new challenges and opportunities arising almost every day. Although my official title is SEO Manager, I actually wear many hats, and do much more than just SEO.

For example, last month I was working exclusively on a deep dive SEO Audit of our entire website. Meanwhile this month, I’m working on a comprehensive Content Audit, and building a new content roadmap for Q4 heading into 2017.

Next month, my focus will likely be working with the dev team to implement all SEO prioritizations. Particularly, Technical SEO — fixing broken content, redirects, improving site speed, etc.

Aside from routine SEO work — I’m currently managing 2 other junior content marketers on our team. Some of my future plans include a comprehensive backlink audit, competitive analysis, and building a new email strategy.

As a marketer, what is your favorite productivity hack?

For me, it’s all about focus. I literally only do one thing at a time. Given the numerous studies that exhibit why multi-tasking destroys productivity, I truly have mastered the art of single-tasking.

This might seem extreme, but here’s what I do to fully get in the zone:

- Mute all Slack channels that are not 100% relevant.

- Only check Email / Slack 3 times a day.

- Never have more than a few browser windows open at once.

- Put my iPhone on airplane mode.

- Announce that I’m in DND mode, and reinforce it by wearing a hoodie.

- Wear noise cancelling headphones and listen to Spanish Flamenco Guitar.

- Consistently decline meetings and politely say no to things that are distracting.

- Remove all clutter from my desk and surrounding areas.

As a person who is well-versed with online marketing, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 3 tools you use?

I’m definitely an SEO geek when it comes to tools. My top 3 are:

- Screaming Frog

- URL Profiler

- AH Refs

I’m also a big fan of SEMrush, Majestic SEO, BuzzSumo, Geckoboard, Trello, and Asana.

Your company has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

Simply — we call and talk to them! For me, I also like to sit in and listen to sales / support calls with existing and prospective customers because it helps me understand their pain points, which I can then try to address / solve through the content we’re creating.

What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?

I’d say that our best channels are organic, direct, and referral. We leverage partnership / influencer marketing too. For example, we partnered with Sales Hacker to launch co-hosted webinars regularly. We find that providing value while cross marketing to new audiences helps us get in front of eyeballs that care about what we do and what our philosophies are.

In terms of conversions — I believe that providing value is key. So classic bottom of the funnel content works best here. Testimonials, Case Studies, Webinars, Downloadables, etc.

Is there any advice you’d like to give to budding marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

Focus on quality not just quantity. I do lots of competitive research, and it blows my mind when I see terrible content that ranks #1 just based off of their Domain Strength. I’m not really a fan of production factories that publish tons of low value, fluffy content — it simply just clutters up the web. The truth is that 10x quality is really hard to produce, and not everyone can do it.

When it comes to productivity — learn to say no. Do you really need to be on that newsletter planning brainstorm, when you could be focusing on ranking improvements for keywords that will increase conversions on your website.

For every time you say yes to something low impact, you’ve taken away time from something else that could yield higher impact.

A big thanks to Gaetano for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you check out Pipedrive.

The ‘How Marketers Stay Productive’ series asks marketers their tips & strategies for staying productive. Every week we’ll feature a new guest and the tricks that keep them working smart. Know someone you’d love to see featured? Email Us.